Kittery school budget hike to exceed council request

Superintendent sticking with 1.78%

KITTERY, Maine — The School Committee is holding firm on seeking an increase above the 1.5 percent requested by the Town Council, giving tentative approval Tuesday night to a proposed fiscal year 2015 budget with a 1.78 percent hike.

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By Deborah McDermott

seacoastonline.com

By Deborah McDermott

Posted Feb. 26, 2014 at 2:00 AM

By Deborah McDermott
Posted Feb. 26, 2014 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

KITTERY, Maine — The School Committee is holding firm on seeking an increase above the 1.5 percent requested by the Town Council, giving tentative approval Tuesday night to a proposed fiscal year 2015 budget with a 1.78 percent hike.

The budget still has not been formally approved, which will happen following a public hearing Tuesday, March 4.

Superintendent of Schools Allyn Hutton told the committee that parents are ready to back them.

"Parents are saying, 'We're ready. We're going to support the budget as presented,'" she said.

But Chairman Ken Lemont also warned the committee that Town Council Chairman Jeff Thomson was very clear to him that he wants to see the 1.5 percent increase.

"We'll have to look at the numbers and strategize, but I want this committee to (ultimately) be unanimous," he said.

Within that context, School Committee members said they could still not support the smaller budget, after seeing that it would mean dropping a number of initiatives Hutton set forth when she presented the proposed budget Feb. 11.

Key among them was a $20,000 pre-kindergarten pilot summer program for a small number of students who tested as needing help with literacy skills. Hutton said some people have had the mistaken impression that the program is similar to a preschool program at the Kittery Community Center. That is not the case, she said.

She said this would help just a small number of students in an intensive, five-day-a-week, five-week program prior to the start of school. The idea is to help these students be ready to learn, which will help them throughout their school years. Other schools that have such programs report dramatic decreases in special education referrals.

"Each referral costs approximately $2,000, so you don't get very far before you have the amount of money we are requesting for this program," she said.

Other services that would need to be reduced to bring the budget to a 1.5 percent increase include gifted and talented programming, a Traip internship coordinator and co-curricular stipends.

The school nutrition program will be level funded, even though Hutton said there was a deficit of roughly $6,000 due primarily to food costs. However, she did say that a portion of the deficit was due to parents who send children to school without any money for lunch.

Still included in the budget is a $14,500 increase in Hutton's salary in fiscal year 2014 — an issue that was not brought up by any school committee member Tuesday. Asked later about it, Lemont said the committee would not be revisiting that issue.